Populating Legal Ontologies using Information Extraction based on Semantic Role Labeling and Text Similarity

Doctoral thesis (2016)

This thesis seeks to address the problem of the 'resource consumption bottleneck' of creating (legal) semantic technologies manually. It builds on research in legal theory, ontologies and natural language ... [more ▼]

This thesis seeks to address the problem of the 'resource consumption bottleneck' of creating (legal) semantic technologies manually. It builds on research in legal theory, ontologies and natural language processing in order to semi-automatically normalise legislative text, extract definitions and structured norms, and link normative provisions to recitals. The output is intended to help make laws more accessible, understandable, and searchable in a legal document management system. Key contributions are: - an analysis of legislation and structured norms in legal ontologies and compliance systems in order to determine the kind of information that individuals and organisations require from legislation to understand their rights and duties; - an analysis of the semantic and structural challenges of legislative text for machine understanding; - a rule-based normalisation module to transform legislative text into regular sentences to facilitate natural language processing; - a Semantic Role Labeling based information extraction module to extract definitions and norms from legislation and represent them as structured norms in legal ontologies; - an analysis of the impact of recitals on the interpretation of legislative norms; - a Cosine Similarity based text similarity module to link recitals to relevant normative provisions; - a description of important challenges that have emerged from this research which may prove useful for future work in the extraction and linking of information from legislative text. [less ▲]

Argumentation-Based Legal Requirements Engineering: The Role of Legal Interpretation in Requirements Acquisition

in Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW), IEEE International (2016)

Classifying and Extracting Elements of Norms for Ontology Population using Semantic Role Labelling

in The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law — San Diego, June 8-12, 2015 (2015)

Mapping Recitals to Normative Provisions in EU Legislation to Assist Legal Interpretation

in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2015)

Compliance with Multiple Regulations

in Conceptual Modeling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8824 (2014)

Managing Legal Resources in Open Government and E-Democracy: Eunomos - an AI and Law Response

in Parycek, Peter; Edelmann, Noella (Eds.) CeDEM 14 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government (2014)

Integrating Legal-URN and Eunomos: Towards a Comprehensive Compliance Management Solution

in AICOL (2013)

Business process compliance with regulations has been a topic of many research areas in Computer Science such as Requirements Engineering (RE), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Logic and Natural Language ... [more ▼]

Business process compliance with regulations has been a topic of many research areas in Computer Science such as Requirements Engineering (RE), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Logic and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This work aims to provide a systematic way of establishing and managing compliance to assist decision-making and reporting. Despite many notable advances, few systems deal adequately with legal interpretation and modeling norms in an expressive way that is well-integrated with business modeling practices. In this paper, we bring together two leading systems, Legal-URN and Eunomos, for a comprehensive compliance management solution. [less ▲]

Eunomos, a Legal Document and Knowledge Management System to Build Legal Services

in Palmirani, Monica; Pagallo, Ugo; Casanovas, Pompeu (Eds.) et al AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems. Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (2012)

We introduce the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document management system with terminology management. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi ... [more ▼]

We introduce the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document management system with terminology management. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps expert users keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. We will describe in particular the editorial process for building legal knowledge. [less ▲]

Towards Legal Knowledge Management Systems for Regulatory Compliance

in IX Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS (2012)

Maintaining regulatory compliance is an increasing concern. Legal Knowledge Management systems could support the work of compliance managers. However, there are challenges to overcome, of interpreting ... [more ▼]

Maintaining regulatory compliance is an increasing concern. Legal Knowledge Management systems could support the work of compliance managers. However, there are challenges to overcome, of interpreting legal knowledge and mapping it onto business processes. In this discussion paper we determine requirements for Legal Knowledge Management systems that can handle these challenges. We argue that an approach to Legal Knowledge Management should consist of four pillars: (1) a legal ontology to express the legal concepts that are central to the interpretation of rules and regulations in practice, (2) natural language processing techniques, to semi-automatically populate the ontology, (3) a systematic method for mapping the legal concepts onto the actual data and business processes of a company, and (4) a method to construct an audit trail as part of the process design, providing legally acceptable evidence of compliance. The challenges are illustrated by an example of MIFID, a set of European regulations in the financial domain. [less ▲]